Thursday, September 30, 2004

Debate Talk

All I have to say is that JFK looked pretty damn presidential, and W looked, well, he looked pissed off and angry.

Democracy at work here at home

Here's a great example for the Iraqis on how democracy works - The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill yesterday repealing most of the District's gun laws, in a vote that handed an election-season victory to gun rights groups and was denounced by the city's leaders as a historic violation of home rule. Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.), the bill's sponsor, called the vote a bipartisan victory for District residents' constitutional right to bear arms. But what about the right to representation in Congress? Or making your own damn laws? Congressman Davis from Virginia, a Republican by the way, had this to say: "No one should question the importance of keeping fully loaded assault weapons off the streets of the District," "There is an important place for debate on D.C. gun laws -- that is in the chambers of the D.C. Council, not the Congress."

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Cheney on Iraq

Here's what he said more than a decade ago defending the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power after the first Gulf War, telling a Seattle audience that capturing Saddam wouldn't be worth additional U.S. casualties or the risk of getting "bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."

Flip-flop? Change of opinion? Seems you were right the 1st time, Dick.

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Read this

The following is from the Toronto Star.

LANDSTUHL, Germany—At the U.S. military hospital on a wooded hilltop here, the cost of the Iraq war is measured in amputated limbs, burst eyeballs, shrapnel-torn bodies and shattered lives.
They're the seriously wounded U.S. soldiers who arrive daily at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a growing human toll that belies American election talk of improving times in Iraq.
They're the maimed and the scarred that hospital staff believe are largely invisible to an American public ignorant of their suffering.
"They have no idea what's going on here, none whatsoever," says Col. Earl Hecker, a critical care doctor who trained at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital.
The broken bodies move some of the hospital's military staff to question a war producing the most American casualties since Vietnam.
And they reduce the chief surgeon to tears.
"It breaks your heart," says Lt.-Col. Ronald Place.
"There's nothing more rewarding than to take care of these guys. Not money, not anything," he adds, crying.
From their hospital beds, solidarity with the men and women in the platoons they've left behind has wounded soldiers expressing an amazing desire to return to Iraq.
But few feel they need to hurry. They're convinced U.S. soldiers will be fighting, dying and getting maimed in Iraq for many years to come.
Says Col. Rhonda Cornum, the hospital's commander: "Peace doesn't seem to be breaking out any time soon."
The 50-year-old medical centre is where the U.S. military's sick and seriously wounded from Iraq are treated after being patched up on the battlefield.
Prior to the Iraq war, the hospital received no more than 10 injured U.S. soldiers a year from conflicts. Now, it usually handles between 30 and 55 a day from Iraq and Afghanistan alone.
Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began in March, 2003, almost 16,000 wounded, injured or sick soldiers from the conflict have been evacuated to Landstuhl.
As of Friday, 1,042 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq — more than 900 of them since May 1, 2003, when U.S. President George W. Bush declared major combat over — and 7,400 were wounded in combat, according to the Pentagon. About 3,400 of the wounded returned to duty after 72 hours. Almost all the rest came to Landstuhl, in southwestern Germany, for treatment.
On Thursday, a medical flight from Iraq brought 27 injured soldiers, two of them fighting for their lives.
"He might not make it," says a member of the medical team as a 27-year-old soldier is lowered from an ambulance and rushed to the intensive care unit.
Plugged to a respirator, the soldier lies naked on a bed, his pelvic area covered by a towel.
A roadside bomb 12 hours earlier left deep burns on 20 per cent of his body, a punctured lung and a broken leg. His chances of survival, a doctor says, are roughly 50-50.
His seared hands are sliced opened to prevent the need for amputation due to swelling. His dead skin is scraped off, a gel is spread thick to prevent infections, and his arms are wrapped in thick, white bandages.
"He's very unstable," says Hecker, 70.
Hecker retired from the military years ago but recently left his lucrative private practice in Detroit to save lives at Landstuhl.
"I'm here for him — nobody else," he says, pointing to the soldier. "I didn't come here for my government."
He pauses, then blurts out: "Bush is an idiot."
Immediately, he regrets having said that about the U.S. president, and makes clear he's been under enormous stress.
He describes taking a bullet out of the neck of an 18-year-old soldier six days ago, a wound that left the young man a quadriplegic.
"It's terrible, terrible, terrible," Hecker says. "When we talked to him, he just cried."
"If it was me, I'd tell them to take me off the machine," he says. He then considers his job and adds, "I'll never be the same mentally."
What the hospital's chief psychologist calls "compassion fatigue" is a widespread syndrome among the medical staff.
"There's a great deal of hurt going on in the hospital," says Maj. Stephen Franco.
But Maj. Cathy Martin, the nurse in charge of the intensive care unit, prefers to deal with her stress by calling on Americans to consider the plight of the war wounded when making a choice in the Nov. 2 presidential election.
"People need to vote for the right people to be in office and they need to be empowered to influence change," she says.
Most combat wounds treated at the hospital are caused by rocket-propelled grenades or shrapnel from bombs, Place says.
About 160 U.S. soldiers from Iraq have had limbs amputated, and 200 have lost all or part of their sight from bomb blasts. Body armour has saved lives, but Place believes wounds that significantly disfigure are a greater advantage to insurgents than the rising body count.
"From a psychological warfare aspect, to maim many is better than to kill a few," he says.
Wounds that can't be seen are also taking their toll. About 1,400 U.S. soldiers have been treated exclusively for mental health problems caused by the trauma of war.
Hospital officials keep access to the wounded strictly limited. But they allow three soldiers to be interviewed, all in the hospital's orthopaedic wing, where two nurses steady a soldier learning to use a walker and dragging a lifeless right leg.
In one room is Marine Lance Cpl. Corey Dailey from San Diego. Dailey says he enlisted shortly after the war started because, "I'm 18-years-old, I wanted to go and get some."
"Combat is the ultimate adrenalin rush. It's scary as hell but when your adrenalin gets pumping, it's really awesome," he says.
Last Wednesday, a month after he got to Iraq, Dailey was at an observation post in Ramadi, part of the so-called Sunni triangle of insurgency, when a sniper's bullet shattered a bone in his right arm.
Now, Dailey doesn't think much of Iraq.
"The whole place sucks," he says. "The heat — that sucks, and the streets smell like crap."
Still, he's itching to go back.
"We can't win this fight without the Iraqis. They need to help us. They need to stand up" to the insurgents, he says.
In another room, 23-year-old Mark Romero from the army's Third Brigade is also nursing a broken arm. A mechanic who served 11 months in Iraq, he snapped a bone trying to stop a 230 kilogram metal door from falling on a fellow soldier.
Lodged in his back is a piece of shrapnel from mortars that rained through the roof of the gym at the U.S. base in Mosul, northern Iraq, while Romero was working out.
He says the question constantly asked by soldiers is: "What are we doing there?"
"Realistically, I think it's going to turn into Korea where we have troops that will always be stationed there," he says of the U.S. military presence in Iraq.
Sitting stiff with pain on his bed is Romero's roommate, Sgt. 1st Class Larry Daniels — "Big Daddy Daniels" to his men in Iraq. His arms are bandaged from just below the shoulders to the tip of his fingers and rods stick out of them like scaffolding. Shrapnel wounds cover the back of his body, from behind his right ear to his ankles.
"They got most of it out," he says about the shrapnel.
Doctors estimate it will take two years for Daniels to recover.
On Sept. 18 at 3:30 p.m., Daniels and his men were protecting Iraqi contractors repairing a chain-link fence on a bridge near the Baghdad airport.
"The traffic was going around us and this guy came out of nowhere," Daniels says, describing a car in the distinctive orange and white colours of local taxis.
"I took a step and I heard a pop, and in my head I thought I stepped on a land mine. At the same time my body went up in the air and I was upside down looking at the cars and the spot where I'd been. And then I hit the ground," he says.
Two of his soldiers in their early 20s lay dead. Daniels, 37, was patched up in a military hospital in Baghdad and arrived at Landstuhl last Monday.
A member of the 1st Cavalry, Bravo 4-5 ADA Company, Daniels traces his family's long military roots to a colonel in the American Civil War.
"I wish I was there instead of here," he says about Iraq. "That's where I'm suppose to be. That's what I was trained to do. I wasn't trained to get hurt."
Suddenly being away from the 23 men in his platoon, Daniels says, "feels like a part of me is gone." He says the soldiers in his platoon never balked at the daily patrols, often working shifts from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m.
"Every day that we did something, we were one day closer to going home," he says. "The more missions we did, the sooner we got out of there."
But no one in his platoon thinks U.S. soldiers will be pulling out of Iraq anytime soon.
"They say our kids might end up here," says Daniels, an Arkansas native.
"It's going to be a long one, because the enemy don't wear a uniform so you can't identify them. If you don't have a specific person to look for, you just have to wait for them to shoot at you."
If Americans understood what was really going on in Iraq, they'd pressure Bush to be clearer about "why we're really fighting," he says.
"The war on terror wasn't in Iraq till we went there," he says. "We initially went there to topple Saddam (Hussein) and then all these damn terrorists came in."
As a soldier, he describes himself as "almost a political prisoner" in the sense that he can't express himself on whether he believes U.S. soldiers should stay in Iraq.
But his 33-year-old wife, Cheryl, has no qualms about speaking her mind.
"The army is not going to like what I have to say, but I think we have no business being there," she says about Iraq.
She too comes from a family with a long military tradition and works as a civilian at her husband's military base in Texas. She voted for Bush in 2000, but now says Democratic challenger John Kerry will get her support.
"I will definitely vote for Kerry, not because I prefer Kerry over Bush but because I don't want Bush back in office. I'm hoping that if Kerry takes office, we'll be pulling out" of Iraq, she says.
Cheryl believes Bush misled the country to war, arguing he diverted resources from far greater threats to U.S. interests, including the hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
Asked why Bush launched the war, she says: "I think he wanted to fill his dad's shoes. I think he felt he had something to prove."
If the point of the war was to remove Saddam from power, then Bush's father, former president George Bush, should have done so in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which Daniels also fought.
Increasing Cheryl's anger is the fact the army did little to help her contact her wounded husband.
She paid for her flight to Germany, and is staying at the Fisher House, a privately funded agency that offers virtually free accommodation in Landstuhl to the families of injured soldiers.
Infuriated by what she sees as a misleading president, an unnecessary war and a heartless military, Cheryl vows to break the Daniels' family tradition of serving their country. Her 12-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter are already talking of enlisting one day, but Cheryl won't hear of it.
"We've paid our dues," she says.

Calvin and Hobbes

Fascinating. Calvin and Hobbes knew about this year's election a long, long time ago!!

Suckling at the teat

Fascinating stuff from TaxProf Blog. The Tax Foundation has released a fascinating report showing which states benefit from federal tax and spending policies, and which states foot the bill. The report shows that of the 32 states (and the District of Columbia) that are "winners" -- receiving more in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes -- 76% are Red States that voted for George Bush in 2000. Indeed, 17 of the 20 (85%) states receiving the most federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Red States. Here are the Top 10 states that feed at the federal trough (with Red States highlighted in bold):

States Receiving Most in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:

1. D.C. ($6.17)
2. North Dakota ($2.03)
3. New Mexico ($1.89)
4. Mississippi ($1.84)
5. Alaska ($1.82)
6. West Virginia ($1.74)
7. Montana ($1.64)
8. Alabama ($1.61)
9. South Dakota ($1.59)
10. Arkansas ($1.53)

In contrast, of the 16 states that are "losers" -- receiving less in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes -- 69% are Blue States that voted for Al Gore in 2000. Indeed, 11 of the 14 (79%) of the states receiving the least federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Blue States. Here are the Top 10 states that supply feed for the federal trough (with Blue States highlighted in bold):

States Receiving Least in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:

1. New Jersey ($0.62)
2. Connecticut ($0.64)
3. New Hampshire ($0.68)
4. Nevada ($0.73)
5. Illinois ($0.77)
6. Minnesota ($0.77)
7. Colorado ($0.79)
8. Massachusetts ($0.79)
9. California ($0.81)
10. New York ($0.81)

Two states -- Florida and Oregon (coincidentally, the two closest states in the 2000 Presidential election) -- received $1.00 in federal spending for each $1.00 in federal taxes paid.

Yet I bet those in the red states complain a whole lot more about "welfare" and government spending than those in the blue states. Go figure.

Sunday, September 26, 2004

Another great weekend!

Arsenal won again (47 game unbeaten streak), UVa pounded Syracuse on a beautiful day in C-ville (it's good to be a season ticket holder!), and I've got Brett Favre on my fantasy team. What a great weekend!!

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Kerry on Letterman last night

He was pretty funny, and Dave actually asked better questions than most "real" journalists. Here's a clip.

Monday, September 20, 2004

Brilliant Ad

This ad will begin circulation tonight in Wisconsin and West Virginia.

Friday, September 17, 2004

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Are we ready for the election?

From the American Progress Action Fund:

Four Years Later, Are We Ready?
After the debacle that was the 2000 election process, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to "help prevent a replay of the Florida punch card-counting embarrassment that left many Americans wondering about the reliability of our voting system." Underfunding and ongoing political machinations, however, have left election reform gridlocked. Ongoing problems: although HAVA authorized the government to spend up to $3.9 billion over three years on new voting equipment, states have thus far received less than half of that. The law requires every state to create a computerized database of all registered voters; today forty states have been able to bypass this requirement, having been granted waivers of their obligation until 2006. And although, as the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project reports, "punch cards have the highest rate of unmarked, uncounted and spoiled ballots over the last four presidential elections," 32 million voters still live in jurisdictions that will use those very same punch card ballots.
ASHCROFT'S COUP: Watching over voter integrity is the job of Attorney General John Ashcroft and lawyers in the Justice Department. A new article in the New Yorker asks, "Is the Justice Department poised to stop voter fraud—or to keep voters from voting?" One looming issue: under Ashcroft, the method of hiring lawyers has changed. In the past, Justice Department lawyers were supposed to be apolitical, hired to spend their careers in government. The hiring program, known as the Attorney General's Honors Program, was run by other mid-level career officials known for their political independence. No more. In 2002, Ashcroft changed the system, putting political appointees in charge. Now, "lawyers inside and outside the department say that the change in the Honors Program has already had an effect, especially in politically sensitive places like the Voting Section."
VALID VOTERS STRUCK FROM ROLLS: Florida is one of only seven states in the union which denies former felons the right to vote, even after they've completed their sentences. In 2000, the state hired an outside contractor to implement a "felon list." Riddled with errors, this list struck thousands of innocent voters from the rolls. Lessons have not been learned. This past May, the Florida Division of Elections quietly distributed a brand-new purge list for the upcoming election. The outgoing head of the division, Ed Kast, sent a memo to election supervisors on May 12, 2004, detailing how to keep the list out of the hands of advocacy groups that wanted to double check the names, "citing statutes about the privacy of voter registration information and the will of the legislature – even though nothing in the law prevents the same information from going to political candidates to further their campaigns." Later that month, after CNN filed suit to gain access to the rolls, they found the new list wrongly included thousands of eligible voters and "heavily targeted African-Americans – who traditionally vote Democrat – while "virtually ignoring Hispanic voters" – who, in Florida, are often more likely to check the box next to GOP names.
ACCENTURE-ATE THE NEGATIVE: After the felon list fiasco in 2000, the Florida legislature mandated that no outside vendor perform that kind of work for the state again. The new Florida purge list, however, was put together with help from Accenture. Accenture, formerly the consulting division of Arthur Andersen, "has contributed $25,000 to Republicans in Florida. The company is currently the subject of a Department of Justice investigation for possible violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribing foreign officials." (In 2001, the company, which was paid $1.6 million for its work on Florida elections, skipped town and relocated to Bermuda to avoid paying U.S. taxes.)
THE RIGHT TO VOTE IS TOO PRICEY: Republican state Senator Anna Cowin, head of the Florida Senate Ethics and Elections Committee, keeps shooting down proposals from black lawmakers to come up with legislation to restore voting rights to former felons. In the October 2004 issue of Vanity Fair, she explains why: "It makes elections very expensive...because you have all these thousands and thousands of people – I mean tens of thousands of people – to send literature to…The people don't come to vote, anyway."
PLAYING POLITICS WITH THE POLLS: The election system is still rife with political maneuverings. In Florida this week, the Division of Elections Director Dawn Roberts steamrolled over an injunction preventing Ralph Nader from appearing on the Florida ballot, directing 67 county voting supervisors to put his name on overseas absentee ballots. (Her excuse? Hurricane Ivan.) A Florida judge ordered election officials to abide by the injunction until the case is heard by the Florida Supreme Court this Friday.
UNDER INVESTIGATION: According to The New York Times, the Pentagon has contracted the handling of overseas ballots to a firm, Omega Technologies Inc., which has had been in trouble in the past for shady business dealings. "In 2002, a resort in Nashville, Gaylord Opryland, accused Omega of failing to pay a bill for $136,187 that the company had incurred in running an Army symposium at the resort. In its lawsuit, Gaylord said the Omega president, Patricia A. Williams, falsely said the payment had been sent and on one occasion provided a fictitious Federal Express package tracking number. Gaylord also said Ms. Williams sent a $50,000 check that bounced."

Here we go again

The Bush administration is debating military strikes on Iran. Can you believe this? Iraq is falling apart, and they're already looking at the next place to invade.

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

What about the poor?

Have you noticed that neither candidate has really said anything about the poor and hungry in America? Every speech W or Kerry gives is all about the middle class. But it isn't government's main function to help those who are powerless? The mark of any society is how it treats it's vulnerable. Yet, by and large, we ignore them. I'm guilty of it. We're all guilty of it. How many times have we ignored a homeless person on the street. Yet, we don't hesitate to buy beer after beer following a softball game. I don't have answer to it. I just no that we all need to take the time to think about our priorities. I don't consider myself a religious person - well that's not entirely true. I'm not a church-goer. The two don't go hand in hand. Anyway, there's a popular saying "What would Jesus do?". He didn't hang out with the folks who were doing okay. He was with the outcasts - the lepers, the poor, the prostitutes - the people we ignore. He'd help a brother out.

Now I know a lot of folks will say, "that's right, Jesus would help a brother out, not the government". And I agree, churches do a great job of helping the destitute. But it's not enough. We need to take a serious look at the root causes of poverty and how best to combat it. When I say we, I mean everyone - Democrats, Republicans, Greens, you name it. Because each child in America that goes to bed hungry, without hope, is a future Einstein, a future MLK that we'll never know about.

George Bush's Words

Hilarious clip from the good folks at the Daily Show.

Woman fired from factory for having Kerry sticker on her car

Freedom of speech? Overrated. Political expression? Who needs it? After all, since W is God's Chosen, opposing him is opposing Him.

Sunday, September 12, 2004

Powell Sees No 'Direct' Link Between Hussein, Sept. 11

He also says that if we were attacked by terrorists, Kerry would "respond in a robust way". Hey Dub, Dick and Rummy, you payin' attention?

Friday, September 10, 2004

Are they forgeries?

More on the forgeries issue.

Electoral College

How it's looking today. Yep, it's a toss up, folks.

Documents may be forgeries

From factcheck.org:

Update: Documents May Be Forgeries09.10.2004

Serious questions have been raised about the authenticity of four documents that CBS News said it had obtained from the personal files of Bush's former squadron commander in the Texas Air National Guard. We are removing reference to them in our Feb. 8 article on the "Texans for Truth" ad until these questions are settled to our satisfaction.
The four memos were purportedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, dated May 2, 1972, May 19 , 1972, August 1, 1972 and August 18, 1973. Killian died in 1984. CBS News didn't say how it had obtained the documents, but said it had was satisfied they were authentic after consulting experts. The White House did not question the documents when it released copies to reporters after obtaining them from CBS.
Subsequently, members of Killian's family said they suspected the documents weren't authentic, and experts quoted by conservative websites and mainstream news organizations said the documents could not have been produced by the typewriters in common use in the early 1970's. The memos contain proportional spacing, in which the letter "i" occupies less space than the letter "m," for example. And they contain the "superscript" character "th" (in “Report to111th F.I.S. administrative officer” in the May 2 memo, for example.) A feature of modern computer word-processing programs such as Microsoft Word automatically changes “th” to superscript characters when following numerals, but such characters were impossible to produce on ordinary typewriters in use in 1972.
The Associated Press quoted Killian's son Gary as saying he doubted his father would have written the 1973 memo which said there was pressure to "sugar coat" Bush's performance review. "It just wouldn't happen," he said. "No officer in his right mind would write a memo like that."
The Washington Post quoted Killian's widow, Marjorie Connell calling the documents "a farce" and saying he didn't keep files: "I don't think there were any documents. He was not a paper person." She said CBS had not asked her to authenticate the records.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Killian's daughter, Nancy Killian Rodriguez, as saying her family knew nothing about the source of the documents. "You can imagine all this from our perspective . . . Why is a man who passed away 20 years ago being brought up on something that happened 30 years ago and what does that have to do with what's going on in the world right now?"
The AP also quoted the personnel chief in Killian's unit at the time, Rufus Martin, as saying he believes the documents are fake: "They looked to me like forgeries. . . I don't think Killian would do that, and I knew him for 17 years."
The AP quoted independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines saying the documents looked as though they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software. Lines is a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
The Washington Post story quoted another document expert, William Flynn, a forensic specialist with 35 years of experience, as saying the CBS documents raise suspicions because of their use of proportional spacing techniques. "Although IBM had introduced an electric typewriter that used proportional spacing by the early 1970s, it was not widely used in government," the Post said.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Farrell C. Shiver, a Georgia-based analyst who edits a journal for document examiners, as saying that the superscript "th" would have been very unusual for that time: "You would not be able to do that with a typewriter at that time unless you had a specialty key made." The New York Times also quoted Shiver questioning the curves in the apostrophes, but adding: "that does not prove that the documents are not genuine."
The New York Times also quoted Philip Bouffard, a forensic document specialist from Ohio, as saying he could find nothing like the characters in the documents in a database he created of 3,000 old type fonts: "I found nothing like this in any of my typewriter specimens." He said they were "certainly consistent with what I see in Times Roman," a commonly used Microsoft Word font.

Thursday, September 09, 2004

Check this out!

This is pretty good.

W in the Guard

Lot's of talk to today about the last night's 60 minutes interview and Bush's service in the Air National Guard. I'll just post some links for now.

Two-Sided Story

Officer told to give Bush good review

Records: Bush Failed to Meet Guard Standards

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Quote of the day

"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Hermann Goerring, Hitler's Reichmarshall, during the Nuremberg Trials

Yep, Keyes is still crazy

What would Jesus do? Apparently, vote for Alan Keyes. Read all about it here.

Cheney and P Diddy, Joining Forces

Trying to appeal to young, urban voters, VP Dick Cheney confused Sean "P. Diddy" Combs' get out the vote slogan "Vote or Die", instead urging voters to "Vote for Us or Die".

Tuesday, September 07, 2004

1,002

Folks, we have just passed the 1,000 mark, with no end in sight. What the hell is going on?

Cornell West Speaks on Democracy, Authoritarianism and Iraq

On this morning's Democracy Now, professor, culture critic, and social justice advocate Cornel West talked about the presidential race, the war in Iraq, the religious right, social change and much more. Author of numerous books on philosophy, race and sociology, West's latest book is Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism. Click here to hear the interview

Bush: OB-GYNs Kept from 'Practicing Their Love'

I know he didn't mean it. I have no idea what he meant. But admit it, it's pretty damn funny!

999

As of 1:45 ET, 999 Americans have died fighting in Iraq.

Crystal Ball

Thought I'd share the following from Larry Sabato's site. He was my government professor at UVa a million years ago (1986).

The Labor Day Assessment
Larry J. SabatoDirector, U.Va. Center for Politics

Labor Day ain't what it used to be. For generations the official start of the campaign, now it is merely a milestone indicating the beginning of the end. The presidential contest has been going full-tilt for a year and a half already!
Yet with the conclusion of the Republican National Convention, we can look at the final two months and plot out the path to Nov. 2.
Our readers tend to be busy people, so we like to keep it short and to the point. Here goes:
Campaigns are living organisms and they have phases of growth and decline, strength and weakness, good luck and ill fortune--sometimes with pain that is self-inflicted. There is an eerie, anthropomorphic resemblance between candidate campaigns and Mother Nature's hurricanes, as we sit and watch Frances tear through the ultimate swing-state of Florida. Each storm is named, it has its own unique pattern of life and death, and it wanders, strengthens, and weakens over time, defying many of the flawed predictions of forecasters. After a seven-month period of difficulty for the Bush campaign, it is now the Kerry campaign's turn.
The Swift Boat Vets story damaged Kerry, and his not-so-swift response throughout August hurt even more.
The Republican convention gave Bush a sizeable bounce, putting Kerry behind the eight-ball for the first time since he won the Iowa caucus in January.
The only constant in presidential politics is change, especially in the final two months, and there will be plenty of change to come, in the polls and on the campaign trail.
The sizeable Bush bounce is a triumph for the president's campaign, contradicting almost all published predictions that, like Kerry, Bush would secure little or no gain in the polls. Pardon our boast, but the Crystal Ball predicted the Bush bounce last Monday in this space. Why did we go out on that particular limb? Because the consensus Beltway wisdom is often wrong, because Bush was due some good luck, and because historically the Republicans usually put on the better, more organized show--something we have personally seen after attending part or all of 16 national conventions, eight on each side.
Both Time and Newsweek, covering slightly different time periods, have a Bush lead of about 11 percent, with Bush over 50 percent in both surveys, and Kerry in the low 40s. This is noteworthy, and cannot be easily dismissed. Future polls will refine the size of the bounce, of course, and the first measurements may have been exaggerated because of their timing. And, sure enough, the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, taken post-convention Sept. 3-5, showed Bush picking up just two points among likely voters, with Kerry dropping 2 percent (or 50 percent to 47 percent for Bush pre-convention, 52 percent to 45 percent for Bush post-convention).
From a political perspective, it is not so much that Bush got the bounce, but that Kerry did not. This reinforces the view that the Democratic convention was poorly planned and executed, with too narrow a focus on Kerry's Vietnam service to the exclusion of nearly everything else--such as a defense of his Senate record.
More disturbing for the Democrats is the possibility that Kerry himself is simply not likeable in the eyes of swing voters. If that slant on the dueling bounces is accurate, then the repair job for Kerry will be much more difficult.
The Bush bounce notwithstanding, we'll bet that by debate time, the Bush-Kerry horserace is again a near-statistical tie, or much more like the CNN/USA Today/Gallup margin than that of the Time or Newsweek poll. The real question is not whether the Bush bounce will fade, but whether it all will disappear--or whether Bush will retain a crucial few points that could easily be the difference between victory and defeat.
It is now clear that Bush's nadir was reached in early August, while Democrats were pumped up after their convention, when the Swift Boat Vets had not yet emerged, and at the moment the bad jobs numbers were released, taking all the wind out of the president's sails. At that moment, we believed that Bush needed a miracle--or a series of small miracles--to win, and lo and behold, his miracles appeared in the form of the Swift Boat Vets; Democrats loathe them but they had a considerable effect, then the GOP Convention, then reasonably good--or at least not demonstrably bad--jobs numbers in early September.
The long and short at Labor Day: President Bush has at least a temporary lead thanks to his convention bounce, but this contest is still very much winnable by John Kerry. The debates--which do have an influence on the remaining undecideds and swing voters, the October jobs numbers (the last such measure before the election), developments in Iraq (including the tragic passing of the 1,000 mark in the deaths of American), the overall war on terrorism, and surprise issues (such as yet another chapter on President Bush's National Guard service--a media-driven penance for the "sins" of the Swift Boat Vets, courtesy of "60 Minutes") all have the potential to affect this highly competitive contest. By the way, prepare yourself for the usual "debate on debates," as President Bush may try what President Clinton accomplished in his reelection race against Senator Dole in 1996: the reduction of the number of presidential debates from three to two. Stay tuned: Not much is certain about this critical part of the campaign yet. The campaigns have agreed to nothing. But there will be at least two debates, plus one vice-presidential debate.

Get ready for the wild, sixty-day ride to Nov. 2
It is one we are all likely to remember for the rest of our political lives. Half of our readers want Kerry to win, the other half Bush. You have about a 50 percent chance of being right with your pick, but please have a little humility about it. Nobody knows the identity of the winner with any degree of certainty as yet, because there are too many unknowns on the road to Election Day. This is one campaign book with a guaranteed surprise ending!



Sunday, September 05, 2004

Great Weekend!

What a great weekend I've been having, tv-wise. 1st, the 90210 marathon on FX, and now, Footloose is on VH-1. I'm totally reliving my teens/20's. Now, if I can find the original season of The Real World in NY (with SF thrown in for good measure), I'd be set!

Thursday, September 02, 2004

Inherited recession?

From salon.com:

So did the recession really precede Bush, as they claim? According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the private, nonpartisan research group responsible for tracking the official peaks and troughs of the U.S. economy, the economy began to contract in March of 2001, two months after Bush was inaugurated; the recession marked the end of the longest period of economic expansion in U.S. history. Under Clinton, in 1999 alone more than 3 million new jobs were added to the economy. In 2000, the year in which Rob Portman says the country was "spiraling into recession," almost two million new jobs were created in America. Most would consider those numbers a fairly robust inheritance.
And contrast those numbers with employment data during Bush's presidency: About 1.8 million jobs were lost in 2001. Five hundred thousand jobs were lost in 2002. And 61,000 jobs were lost in 2003. It's true that since then, about a million people have found new jobs -- but during the Clinton years, there were a million new jobs added every couple months.
The Republicans may be selling some economic hocus-pocus, but so far "Bush prosperity" isn't buying a whole lot of jobs for the unemployed multitudes in places like Ohio and Michigan.

Bumper Stickers

On my car I have this bumper sticker: "I don't have to like Bush to love my country". Well, it looks like the GOP doesn't agree with me. That's the message I've been getting all week from watching this convention. The GOP is trying to quash criticism of the president simply because it's criticism of the president. The election is becoming a referendum on democracy.

In a democracy, the commander in chief works for you. You hire him when you elect him. You watch him do the job. If he makes good decisions and serves your interests, you rehire him. If he doesn't, you fire him by voting for his opponent in the next election.

Not every country works this way. In some countries, the commander in chief builds a propaganda apparatus that equates him with the military and the nation. If you object that he's making bad decisions and disserving the national interest, you're accused of weakening the nation, undermining its security, sabotaging the commander in chief, and serving a foreign power—the very charges Miller leveled against Bush's critics.

Yep, more flip-flops

As convention goers last night chanted "flip-flop" during the VP's speech, I decided to check up on W some more. You know, the President who Giuliani said was "a leader who is willing to stick with difficult decisions even as public opinion shifts." The one Schwarzenegger called a "leader who doesn't flinch, doesn't waver, does not back down."

Yesterday, I mentioned his switch on abortion nearly 30 years ago. I'll be a bit more topical today. Bush initially opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, then changed his mind when it was clear the votes were against him. He opposed the creation of the 9/11 Commission, then supported it. He opposed a congressional investigation into the intelligence failures that led to the war in Iraq, then supported it. The president who was praised so often this week for his "unflinching" war on terror once said he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive", then said that he didn't really care about finding him. The president who never wavers used to say that America will win the war on terror; over the weekend, he said "I don't think we can ever win it"; over the last week, he's been explaining that he didn't really mean what he said when he said it.

And it's not just W. On Tuesday night, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist tried to make Bush look like a strong leader on domestic issues, saying that he would stand up to the trial lawyers who are driving up the costs of healthcare. Repeating a line used by Bush himself, Frist declared: "Let's be clear. You can no longer be both pro-patient and pro-trial lawyer." He said that Kerry has "made his choice" by choosing Edwards as his running mate. But Frist has made his choice, too: in the Republican Senate primary in Florida, Frist endorsed Mel Martinez, a millionaire trial lawyer.

I just posted a quote from a Republica icon, Teddy Roosevelt. Well, here's one from their #1 icon, which I guess they've taken to heart - "Facts are stupid things" Ronald Reagan 1988

A little fact checking

"America needs to know the facts," Zell Miller said last night, but he failed to mention a few of them. Miller told the delegates that Kerry voted against production of the F-14 and F-15 fighters and the Apache helicopter, but he didn't say that Dick Cheney, as defense secretary, proposed eliminating both of them, too. Miller criticized Kerry for voting against the B-2 bomber, but he didn't say that President George H.W. Bush also proposed an end to the B-2 bomber program. In his 1992 State of the Union Address, Bush said he supported such cuts "with confidence" based on the recommendations of his Secretary of Defense: Dick Cheney. With the Cold War over, Bush said, failing to cut defense spending would be "insensible to progress."

That's not how Miller described the cuts last night. He said Kerry's record on defense spending suggests that he wants to arm U.S. troops with "spitballs." Miller, who was introduced as the "conscience of the Democratic Party," didn't see fit to mention that he and Kerry both voted in 2002 for the largest military spending increase in two decades -- a defense bill that Republican Senator John Warner said would "help to ensure that our military has the tools it needs to defend our nation."


A quote

Given the harsh tone of last night's speeches, maybe the folks at the RNC should listen to one of their heroes:

"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."- President Theodore Roosevelt, 1912

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

Iraq's gonna be like Northern Ireland says Rove

I swear to God, I'm not making this up.

President Bush's chief strategist said Wednesday that Democratic Sen. John Kerry tarnished "the records and service" of fellow Vietnam veterans with his anti-war protests, and compared the U.S. war on terrorism to the decades-old conflict in Northern Ireland.

They've been fighting each other in Northern Ireland for a few centuries, right?

Another flip-flop

In a 1978 interview with the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, congressional candidate George W. Bush "said he opposes the pro-life amendment favored by (his opponent) and favors leaving up to a woman and her doctor the abortion question."

Hmm. This is the same guy who is "pro-life" and as president supports a consitutional amendment to ban abortion. What gives?